Susan McKinnon

Professor, Emerita

As a cultural anthropologist, my research and writing have long been focused on issues relating to kinship, marriage, and gender. I am fascinated by their cross-cultural and historical diversity, by their centrality in the structures and dynamics of hierarchy and equality, and by the way scientific texts have transformed their culturally specific manifestations into universal facts of nature.

I began my investigations by thinking about the significance of kinship and gender in the creation of social hierarchy and equality. In a restudy of Raymond Firth's ethnography of Tikopia (1990) and in the book resulting from my own research in the Tanimbar Islands of Eastern Indonesia (1991), I examined how relations of hierarchy and equality are created through the articulation of differentially valued relations of kinship, marriage, gender, and exchange. This work has also been integral to the development of a broader conversation among socio-cultural anthropologists and archaeologists about the usefulness of Lévi-Strauss’s concept of “house societies” for an understanding of the emergence of social hierarchy.

Relative Values: Reconfiguring Kinship Studies(2001), edited with Sarah Franklin, explored contemporary transformations in kinship (and kinship studies) in the wake of the new reproductive technologies, the biogenetic and information technologies, gay and lesbian relations, the new global political economy, and the resulting transnational migrations of people and cultures.

A critical appreciation of the history of kinship studies and anthropological theory is central to much of my research and writing. In "Domestic Exceptions" (2000), for example, I revealed how the particular analytic concepts and domains used by Evans-Pritchard had the effect of disassembling Nuer understandings of social relations, of misrepresenting the Nuer as strictly patrilineal and egalitarian, and of obscuring the hierarchical dynamics of Nuer society.

Over the years I have been interested in tracing the ways in which different forms of kinship and marriage have been used as signifiers of what is considered “backward” or “modern” in the meta-narratives of social evolution, development, and modernization that have been at the core of social theory for the past 150 years. I am currently writing a book that investigates the shifting evaluation and stigmatization of cousin marriage in nineteenth- and twentieth-century America in order to probe the “taboos” that bring into being what counts as “modern.” And, in an SAR conference volume, Vital Relations: Modernity and the Persisent Life of Kinship (2013), Fenella Cannell and I challenge the reigning presumption that “modernity” is marked, in part, by the separation of kinship from economic and political relations.

I am intrigued, more broadly, by the ways in which culturally specific ideas of kinship and gender are "naturalized" as universal scientific truths. I have written on this topic in connection with American scientific conceptions of incest and also in critiques of evolutionary psychology. In Complexities: Beyond Nature and Nurture(2005),co-edited with Sydel Silverman, we brought together a multifaceted argument from the four fields of anthropology to challenge and offer accessible alternatives to reductive theories of human social life that currently saturate the American popular media. Following upon this initiative, I wrote Neo-liberal Genetics: The Myths and Moral Tales of Evolutionary Psychology(2005). In this Prickly Paradigm Pamphlet, I mobilized anthropological understandings of the diverse cultural arrangements of kinship, marriage, and gender to argue against the claims of evolutionary psychology that (Western) gender attributes are both universal and genetically determined.

Specializations

Selected Publications

2017 Temperamental Differences: The Shifting Political Implications of Cousin Marriage in Nineteenth-Century America. Social Analysis 60(2):31-46.

2017 Kinship Particularism and the Project of Anthropological Comparison. In Human Nature and Social Life: Perspectives on Extended Social Life. Jon Henrik Ziegler Remme and Kenneth Silander, eds., pp. 150-165. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

2015 Productive Paradoxes of the Assisted Reproductive Technologies in the Context of the New Kinship Studies. Journal of Family Issues 36(4):461-479.

2013 Kinship within and beyond the “Movement of Progressive Societies.” In Vital Relations: Modernity and the Persistent Life of Kinship. Susan McKinnon and Fenella Cannell, eds., pp. 39-62. Santa Fe: School for Advanced Research Press.

2013 The Difference Kinship Makes (with Fenella Cannell). In Vital Relations: Modernity and the Persistent Life of Kinship. Susan McKinnon and Fenella Cannell, eds., pp. 1-38. Santa Fe: School for Advanced Research Press.

2005 On Kinship and Marriage: A Critique of the Genetic and Gender Calculus of Evolutionary Psychology. In Complexities: Beyond Nature and Nurture. Susan McKinnon and Sydel Silverman, eds. Pp. 106-131. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

2000 The Tanimbarese Tavu: The Ideology of Growth and the Material Configurations of Hierarchy. In Beyond Kinship: Social and Material Reproduction in House Societies. Susan D. Gillespie and Rosemary Joyce, eds. Pp. 161-166. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

1996 Hot Death and the Spirit of Pigs: The Sacrificial Form of the Hunt in the Tanimbar Islands. In For the Sake of Our Future: Sacrificing in Eastern Indonesia. Signe Howell, ed. Pp. 337-349. Leiden: Research School Centre for Non-Western Studies, University of Leiden.

1995 Houses and Hierarchy: The View from a South Moluccan Society. In About the House: Lévi-Strauss and Beyond. J. Carsten and S. Hugh Jones, eds. Pp. 170-188. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

1991 From a Shattered Sun: Hierarchy, Gender, and Alliance in the Tanimbar Islands. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

1990 The Matrilateral Transference of Power in Tikopia. Journal of the Polynesian Society 99(3): 227-264; 99(4):341-371.

1989 Flags and Half-Moons: Tanimbarese Textiles in an 'Engendered' System of Valuables. In To Speak with Cloth: Studies in Indonesian Textiles. M. Gittinger, ed. Pp. 27-42. Los Angeles: UCLA Museum of Cultural History.